Motivational Quotes

Music

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

- Mann, Thomas

Best Quotes about Music

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

Music is a readily available, highly effective tool that you use to improve both your cognitive and physical abilities.

Winter, Arthur

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

Stravinsky, Igor

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Auden, W. H.

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

The history of a people is found in its songs.

Jellinek, George

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

I can sing, and speak to him in many sorts of music.

William Shakespeare

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

10.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

11.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

12.

A lot of people are singing about how screwed up the world is, and I don't think that everybody wants to hear about that all the time.

Carey, Mariah

13.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

14.

Alas! all music jars when the soul's out of tune.

Cervantes, Miguel De

15.

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought.

Mungers, Theodore

16.

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.

Einstein, Albert

17.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

18.

The high note is not the only thing.

Domingo, Placido

19.

All my concerts had no sounds in them; they were completely silent. People had to make up their own music in their minds!

Yoko Ono

20.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

21.

It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

Johnson, Samuel

22.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.

Britten, Benjamin

23.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stravinsky, Igor

24.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

Huneker, James G.

25.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

26.

Music, moody food of us that trade in love.

William Shakespeare

27.

For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.

Plato

28.

I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.

Sir Edward Appleton

29.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

Sir Thomas Beecham

30.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Igor Stravinsky

31.

I am fond of music I think because it is so amoral. Everything else is moral and I am after something that isn't. I have always found moralizing intolerable.

Hesse, Hermann

32.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

George Eliot

33.

I wish Frank Sinatra would just shut up and sing.

Bacall, Lauren

34.

Next to theology I give music the highest place of honor.

Luther, Martin

35.

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

Zappa, Frank

36.

I often thought that if there had been a good rap group around in those days, I might have chosen a career in music instead of politics.

Nixon, Richard M.

37.

Country music is three chords and the truth.

Howard, Harlan

38.

Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.

John Erskine

39.

There once was a brainy baboon who always breathed down a bassoon for he said, It appears that in billions of years I shall certainly hit on a tune.

Pound, Ezra

40.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

41.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

42.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

Brown, James

43.

Music makes one feel so romantic - at least it always gets on one's nerves - which is the same thing nowadays.

Oscar Wilde

44.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

45.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

46.

We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.

West, Rebecca

47.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

Martin Luther

48.

If you can walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.

Proverb, Zimbabwe

49.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Dvorak, Antonin

50.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Levi-Strauss, Claude